Sunday, February 26, 2012

In my last post, I mentioned both that 1) I'm looking for ways to organize my blog archives and that 2) The Rite of Spring has been the most frequently revisited topic here. Archiving the Rite stuff seemed like as good a way as any to get started. Maybe this isn't the most practical of organizational strategies, but here I present my first-ever image map, kind of a fun way to collect all my Rite content into one multimedia mashup.

My intent was (is) to write a nice little essay about the Rite of Spring as cultural icon, using these various posts and multimedia creations [all clickable from within the image above] as featured players - but, for now, you can tell that I'm still more interested in tossing things together semi-randomly than in doing my homework. Maybe that's the point of this blog...

Friday, February 24, 2012

Today marks the five year anniversary of MMmusing. I know it might seem like I've given up blogging since there have been no postings here for more than two months, but the truth is, it's just been a busy time and the blog been's on casual hiatus (hibernation?).

However, I have every intention of keeping it going, with lots of ideas for posts and multimedia creations buzzing around in my head. I know that long breaks are bad form if you want to build a blogging audience, but as much as I like the idea of a regular flow of ideas, I also think of this five years' worth of material as something more permanent - not exactly a book, but not something completely ephemeral either. There's a lot of useful content that could be more usefully archived, and that's one of my goals in the months ahead, to repackage the content and make the case that I've done something. Stay tuned.

But today's a big anniversary day, so I thought we'd celebrate with something new as a way of giving myself a round of applause in style. The quick backstory: I've been talking to our music majors about Steve Reich's Clapping Music, and we tried to perform it as a group in a class recently. (More on that to come, perhaps.) I then sent out an email with links to a bunch of YouTube versions - none better than this one starring Angie Dickinson, by the way (proving that classical music needs more Angie Dickinson) - and one clever student wrote the following on my Facebook wall the next day:

Clapping musicOn two pianosWith Danses des Adolescentes chord

Well, yes! I'm a little sad I hadn't thought of this idea myself* (though proud to have such students around), but I did spend some time inputting it into Finale, and you can see/hear the results below. Not only does it use the famous polychord from Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, but because that chord is famously comprised of two different consonant sonorities (an E-flat 6/5 chord and an E chord), I let each chord take its own part. The way Reich's piece works is that the first part continues with the exact same rhythmic pattern throughout, while the second part repeats the same pattern but phase-shifting at regular rates, so that the pattern gets tilted against itself. (Watch here.)

Although I'm sure some of the purity of the original concept is lost, I kind of like hearing the two patterns in opposing tonalities and registers - it makes the back and forth a little more clear. But you can judge for yourself.